Stephen Adly Guirgis is a member and former co-artistic director of LAByrinth Theater Company, and the 2015 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. His plays have been produced on five continents and throughout the United States. They include Our Lady of 121st Street (Drama Desk, Lucille Lortel, Outer Critics Circle Best Play Nominations), Jesus Hopped the 'A' Train (Edinburgh Festival Fringe First Award, Barrymore Award, Olivier Nomination for London's Best New Play), In Arabia, We'd All Be Kings (2007 LA Drama Critics Best Play, Best Writing Award), The Last Days of Judas Iscariot (10 Best Plays of the Year, Time Magazine & Entertainment Weekly), and The Little Flower of East Orange (with Ellen Burstyn & Michael Shannon). All five plays were directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman and were originally produced by LAByrinth. His Broadway debut, The Motherfucker with the Hat (6 Tony nominations, including Best Play), was directed by Anna D. Shapiro and marked his third consecutive world premiere co-production with The Public Theater and LAByrinth. In London, his plays have premiered at The Donmar Warehouse, The Almeida (dir: Rupert Goold), The Hampstead (Robert Delamere), and at The Arts Theater in the West End. Other plays include Den of Thieves (Labyrinth, HERE, HAI, Black Dahlia) and Dominica The Fat Ugly Ho (dir: Adam Rapp) for the 2006 E.S.T. Marathon. He has received the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Yale Wyndham-Campbell Prize, a PEN/Laura Pels Award, a Whiting Award, and a TCG fellowship. He is also a New Dramatists Alumnae and a member of MCC's Playwright's Coalition, The Ojai Playwrights Festival, New River Dramatists, and Labyrinth Theater Company. As an actor, he has appeared in theater, film and television, including roles in Kenneth Lonergan's film Margaret, Todd Solondz's Palindromes, and Brett C Leonard's Jailbait opposite Michael Pitt. A former violence prevention specialist and H.I.V. educator, he lives in New York City.
Guirgis, a brilliant comedic talent...has an original and knowing take on class, particularly as it plays out among the bottom-of-the-barrel working-class poor, who are virtually invisible to the wealthier men and women around them...Jackie and Veronica are two hopeful losers who want to win the kind of intimacy they've seen in movies, but for whom it's always just out of reach...The interplay of their desire and their deceit makes them one of the most beautifully drawn couples to appear on the stage in years...Guirgis knows enough about life to ask the right questions: What is recovery? And who, if anyone, can recover from the brutal high of a love hangover? --Hilton Als, New Yorker One of the best new plays to come to Broadway in ages, The Motherfucker with the Hat is tight, smart and splendidly well-made, a tough-minded unromantically romantic comedy that keeps you laughing, then sends you home thinking. --Terry Teachout, Wall Street Journal Funny indeed--not to mention surprising, disturbing and poignant. Guirgis both flirts with and defies our preconceived notions about how social and moral struggles can define people. His characters are too refreshingly, frustratingly human to pin down, or write off. In Hat, Guirgis gives us a slice of hard life that's as provocative as it is absorbing. --Elysa Gardner, USA Today